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on Tuesday July 08, 2014 @02:07AM
from the never-forget-tempest-x3 dept.

motang (1266566) writes Rob Pardo, Blizzard employee of 17 years who has worked on Warcraft and Diablo is leaving the company. "I'm looking forward to new challenges in my career, but I will always cherish the time I spent with you all and the amazing and collaborative teams at Blizzard," Pardo said. "It was both satisfying and humbling, and it made me a better developer and a better person. I look forward to playing Blizzard games as a player for many years to come. Most important, now I have plenty of time to learn how to build a competitive Hearthstone deck."

WoW has seen better days. WoD looks like a dull rehash of BC. I just cancelled sub, despite preodering WoD. I think this, along with the departure of Ghostcrawler, signals the end of days for Blizzard.

Agreed. When they started selling children's Warcraft building blocks (and by children, I mean five-year olds) I knew I would never go back.

I miss it. I miss spending months getting to the highest level. Now, you get one character automatically set to the highest level just by joining. Or you can spend 60$ to get any other character to the highest level.

The biggest issue with pay-for-advancement is that the quality of player diminishes rapidly. I don't say this from some kind of elitist perspective, but it used to be that if you saw someone at max level with a good set of gear that was hard to obtain, you had a reasonable probability that they earned it through effort with a group of similarly skilled people.

Now, not so much. As of the last time I logged into WoW (18 months ago) raiding has been watered down to being a weekly chore (in between collect 20

I agree. Remember when Wrath of the Lich King came out? DKs...terrible DKs everywhere! Starting at level 55 with no idea how their class mechanics worked.

I was a hardcore raider (top 20 guilds on wowprogress) up through Cata. I liked Cata. Heroic Ragnaros was...challenging. But then they announced fucking pandas and I quit. Eventually I was bored and I reupped just to level and see what the expansion was like. I couldn't believe it when here I am helping pandas chase rabbits out of their gardens. Um. I'm a

DKs = Death Knights. New class introduced in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. They started at level 55. A level 55 character has a good number of spells and abilities that a player who started at level 1 would be introduced to slowly and would have plenty of time to learn and understand. If you just start at level 55 with two action bars full of unfamiliar abilities, you basically have no idea what you're doing. Also, lots and lots of people wanted to play the new class, so in dungeon groups you wound

Maybe there was a core problem with the WOW audience, and the expansions you disliked were responses to that problem, not the problem itself. They likely burned through all the hardcore players they were going to get. Their best opportunity to keep growing the franchise was in casual players like me, who would invest 2-3 hours per week. It's not the fault of the developers, just the product life cycle. Valar morgulis dude, all men must die.

It doesn't have anything to do with the difficulty of the game. For years they've been expanding what the game offers to different people to be as inclusive as possible. No one has to do the heroic raids. Those are only for the top end raiding guilds that want that kind of challenge. For "regular" players there are the non-heroic raids. For casuals, they added in the "raid finder" system where you just queue up and it matches you with randoms for an even easier version of the encounters.

tbh that rabbit thing sounds pretty cool. are the pandas like pets, or like neighbors or wild forest animals? It would be cool if you could domesticate a panda then use it on your quests to carry your shizz. Did you ever wonder where a raider kept all his shizz?

World of Warcraft Mega Bloks. [megabloks.com] Hypothetically, any retailer that has a large enough toy section that Legos hasn't completely pushed out any "Lego-compatible" building brick sets. On-line too, I guess, but the few I have I actually picked up out of clearance bins at places like Target.

I played FFXI for 5 years and switched to XIV when Beta III opened (the first phase I could join as I only have a PS3 and no PC). While the art style's general realism versus WoW's colorful palettes appeals to me, I wouldn't say it has a perceptible effect on maturity.

Honestly, since the PS4 client went live in February, I'd say the otherwise higher maturity level has dipped. And I'm saying that as a PS4 player lol. My biggest gripe is the ability of a committed player to solo or PUG almost anything in

Ha, ha... I saw this yesterday but didn't get round to commenting then. Hope you see this ^^

There's a lot wrong with me actually. Only some of it is FF and/or MMO related. But that said, XI provided an online team-building experience I've yet to duplicate. People cared because they HAD to care. Not sure if any current / modern MMOs require such closeness.

My biggest gripe is the ability of a committed player to solo or PUG almost anything in the game, meaning relationships of trust and teamwork aren't required as they were in XI or older WoW. There's your maturity issue - anyone can be a childish jerk because they can just reform the party or queue up for a random assignment...

For me, that was the reason to quit as well. When there was no longer a need for 80 people to behave in a guild in order to even have a shot at running Molten Core, or Deathwings Lair, the pressure on behaving yourself dropped. By the time 10 people were enough for everything, every guild had fractured and you could just PUG everything. For me, the social aspect of the game was the most interesting. When that went out the door, the appeal went as well.

DISCLAIMER: I do not know you. This post will say "you" but I mean you in a general sense and not you personally.

Your guilds were never strong to begin with. The only reason those 80 people played nice was because many of the big guild leaders were total aspie douchnozzles who held the raids and loot over your head like Damocles Sword. If you didn't kowtow to these guys then you weren't running shit. It didn't even matter if you were good or not. You could be the most epic player on the planet but i

What killed guilds are the large number of teenagers who joined the game and over compensated for being a nobody at high school by being massive dicks online. They would act nice until they joined and then they would troll the guild channel and create "drama" all fucking night. You can/gkick them to the cows come home and you'll find put that they left an alt character behind to continue to fuck with the guild. We had trouble managing the banks because they would constantly raid it without putting anything

Are you claiming that WoW way back 2004 was nothing but responsible adults who were all perfectly mannered and knew their class? Preposterous! I bet you have the cleanest, nicest yard in Azeroth simply because you don't allow anyone on it!:D

You can call them and get the preorder cancelled. If you're serious that is. Most of the folks like you aren't. You'll see thread after thread on the Wow forums with people quitting left and right but do you know how many times crackheads, alcoholics, and junkies in general say "I quit, this is it. Never again!" Pretty much all of them. It lasts a few days at most and they're right back at their addiction. I've quit wow before. I hate kung fu pandas soooooo fucking much. Guess what I'm doing now? L

Come on editors! First a typo in the company name and then rattling off some guys name and saying he's an employee of some misspelt company who's been somehow involved in some games?

I clicked on the article to find out why I should give a damn. Then I was going to write about why is this news. Would it have killed you to use the words "Chief Creative Officer", or "Lead Designer of World Of Warcraft", or pointed out that he was listed in Time's 100 most influential people?

Nope apparently he's just some dude who's been working at some company too long. Much like the editors here, although it seems the word "working" in Slashdot's case would be a heck of a stretch.

This is pretty common on slashdot. A hazard of submitted stories where the person submitting it is very familiar with the people/companies/concepts/software/whatever concerned, and can't imagine anyone who isn't.

No it's a hazard of editors not doing their job. That is their job, to be the buffer between the reader and the source, to edit submissions so they make sense to the readership. If we palm that responsibility of to the submitted then there would be no point in hiring editors.

I miss the game so much. I was just watching some of my last avis the other day - my glorious feral bear in Tol Barad. Charge, mangle, swipe - then charge away so they hit air. I loved it when healers and casters stand out of range - always gave me an out when things got hot (bears are quite flammable). Always on the move, running figure 8s thru my victim. 'Hey, bears aren't supposed to do this kind of damage!' Heh.

The feral bear was so badass. I was the first to come out of the 'closet' and tank HoR out in the middle of the room. Only the bear could do that. A real epic move, hard to pull off, was to resurrect my healer while tanking. If you ever bear tanked in Wrath, then you know what I'm talking about.

I started PVPing the bear back in Wintergrasp, back when bears were "not viable in PVP", being tanks and all. I died a lot, for a long time. PVP was hard enough, but to do it with an underpowered class... I was always the only bear (save for dying desperate restos trying to get away - always a mistake imo). It was really really hard, both to learn, and after that, just to play well and not spaz out. Epic battles... It would sometimes take a dozen men to bring me down.

And then to get into rated BGs. That was a hell of a day, when I finally earned the best weapon in game (not counting legendary) that seemed so impossible when the season started. For a few minutes once, we had the best 10 man BG team on the server. The most fun I've ever had while looking at a screen. By far. Realize I'm a 47 year old dude at the time, and had to completely give up TV to do this.

If you've got somebody willing to do that, *and* pay you $15 a month for it; my advice is to not eff that up. I understood that Wrath of the Lich King was going to be hard to follow. They really got the story together for that, and while story has little to do with PVP, Warcraft overall needs the backstory.

So I guess knowing they were going to fuck it up, they actually made that the core of the next expansion. They literally broke the world, and made it part of the story. So they took away feral, my best time, and they took away Ashenvale, my other favorite thing - lost in a magical fairyland as a low level noob... Then they followed that with pandas...

Everything I liked about the game, they changed. It's almost like I wish I had never played. Because now I know what I'm missing.

Bears are the only class I can consistently roflstomp with very little attention payed. I don't know what you managed to do no one else could figure out but bears are still the only class "not viable in pvp". Even prot pallys are better! And that was in Cata. I gave up on pvp in Pandaria. They broke it badly. Hell, I gave up on Pandaria period. I don't care how many people want to point out brewmasters in WC3- Blizz CLEARLY copied Kung Fu Panda. Fuck pandas!